Finally, Iran and Israel agree on one thing. Both of them think this is no time to talk. Iran won’t talk about a ceasefire until Israel unilaterally ceases its fire. And Israel won’t talk about peace until Iran starts acting peacefully, especially in its nuclear-weapons push and terrorist-proxy wars against Israel.
Israel’s UN ambassador told reporters at Turtle Bay that his country isn’t interested in another round of blah blah blah while the UN turns a blind eye to the nature of the Iranian regime:
“We have seen diplomatic talks for the last few decades, and look at the results,” Danny Danon told reporters at the United Nations.
“If there will be genuine effort to dismantle the capabilities of Iran, then that’s something we can consider, but if it is going to be like another session and debates, that’s not going to work.
“If it is going to be just another round of talks, that’s something which we cannot accept,” Danon said.
Clearly, Israel isn’t up for just more chit-chat about how to “limit’ Iran’s ambitions for nuclear weapons. They have their own ideas about how to limit that pursuit. In fact, the IDF and Mossad imposed another “limitation” today:
Israel on Friday launched a fresh wave of strikes on Iran and appeared to continue its campaign against Iran’s nuclear program, with reports emerging from Tehran that an IDF drone targeted and killed an Iranian nuclear scientist who had been holed up in a safe house.
The strike came as Defense Minister Israel Katz said that he instructed the IDF to “intensify strikes on regime targets in Tehran” to “destabilize” the Iranian regime.
An Iranian news website said a drone had struck an apartment in a residential building in central Tehran on Friday, but did not give details.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the scientist who was attacked specialized in weaponry and was being kept in a hiding spot outside of his home. An official speaking to the Journal refused to provide the scientist’s name.
Yesterday, the IDF also imposed another limitation on the Arak heavy-water facility as well as other sites associated with Iran’s nuclear program. The Israelis issued a warning on social media for those around the facility to evacuate, although the Iranian regime’s shutdown of Internet service may have kept people from receiving the warning. The IAEA had inspected the facility a month earlier and didn’t find any fissile material, so the risk of radiation leaks was thought to be minimal. The destruction of the partially constructed reactor will set back any attempts to build a plutonium-based nuclear weapon by at least a few years.
The Israelis also began hitting targets in Isfahan again, as the IAEA identified those facilities as a planned enrichment center that the regime had ordered to defy international objections to their nuclear development programs:
U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi on Thursday identified Isfahan, home to one of Iran’s biggest nuclear facilities, as the location of a uranium enrichment plant that Iran said it would soon open in retaliation for a diplomatic push against it.
The day before Israel launched its military strikes against Iranian targets including nuclear facilities last Friday, Iran announced it had built a new uranium enrichment facility, which it would soon equip and bring online. Tehran did not provide details such as the plant’s location.
Iran’s announcement was part of its retaliation against a resolution passed by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors declaring Tehran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations over issues including its failure to credibly explain uranium traces found at undeclared sites.
Had it gone online, the new enrichment plant would have been the fourth in operation in Iran. But Israel’s attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities destroyed one of those plants and put another out of action by killing its power supply, the IAEA has said.
The focus on the Iranian nuclear-development infrastructure includes the active reactor at Bushehr, which the IDF briefly identified as a target before withdrawing that message as an ‘error.’ Busher is a breeder reactor, which makes it part of the Iranian enrichment program that the US and Israel want to end, but is also run in partnership with Russia. The Russians warned of the dangers of military actions around reactors, which provided atomic levels of irony to the entire world:
The Western media should be ringing “alarm bells” about the nuclear risks involved in the Iran conflict, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, as Israel strikes Iranian nuclear facilities. …
“It’s remarkable how little attention Western media are paying to the nuclear risks involved,” Zakharova said at a meeting with journalists during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), state media agency TASS reported.
“No alarm bells are being rung, no calls for restraint—as if this is just another routine escalation that we’ve seen many times before.”
Ahem. The Russians have spent the last three years shelling in and around the reactors at Zaporizhzhia without any heed to “alarm bells.” They also flounced past and around the now-defunct Chernobyl disaster site in their opening invasion, without any “alarm” for the safety of the region or of its own troops. Russia has, however, apparently evacuated its own staff from the Bushehr plant, so it’s not as if they don’t grasp the FAFO consequences in Iran, even if they don’t acknowledge them in Ukraine.
The big test, obviously, is Fordow. The Israelis want Donald Trump to order an airstrike on the once-secret nuclear-weapons development site using our superior bomber and ordnance capabilities, specifically the B-2 stealth bomber and the GBU-57 ‘bunker buster’ used occasionally in Afghanistan against Taliban positions. Fordow is indeed the most pressing part of the Iranian nuclear program; the IAEA found uranium enriched to nearly 84% purity in 2023, just below the 90% level needed for nuclear weapons — and way above the thresholds for any other purpose. The best option to disable Fordow would be the GBU-57, and Israel’s fighter-bomber platforms can’t carry it.
Trump wants to give another two weeks for this decision, however, so the Israelis might look for other ways to address Fordow:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly implied that his country is capable of attacking all of Iran’s nuclear facilities — even the secretive Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, which is believed to be buried half a mile under a mountain.
Netanyahu insisted the Jewish state “will achieve all our objectives” despite many military experts doubting that the Jewish state has the capabilities of taking out the underground nuclear facility site.
“We will achieve all our objectives and hit all of their nuclear facilities. We have the capability to do that,” Netanyahu said when asked by a reporter about Fordow specifically.
We’ll see soon enough. But we can’t trust the Iranians to shut that down, and the risk to America’s national security from a nuclear-armed Iran is nearly as grave as it is to Israel. I’d bet that the decision takes less than two weeks, and that Trump comes to that same conclusion — Fordow can’t be allowed to survive this war.
